Abstract
The traditional content-based retrieval approaches usually use flat querying, where whole multimedia database is searched for a result of some similarity query with a user specified query object. However, there are retrieval scenarios (e.g., multimedia exploration), where users may not have a clear search intents in their minds, they just want to inspect a content of the multimedia collection.
In such scenarios, flat querying is not suitable for the first phases of browsing, because it retrieves the most similar objects and does not consider a view on part of a multimedia space from different perspectives. Therefore, we defined a new Multilayer Exploration Structure (MLES), that enables exploration of a multimedia collection in different levels of details.
Using the MLES, we formally defined popular exploration operations (zoom-in/out, pan) to enable horizontal and vertical browsing in explored space and we discussed several problems related to the area of multimedia exploration.